Bill Z Bubba

That's just false.

If that's the case. I'm arguing that it's not. based on the game as it is right now, tanks will level faster solo to 50 than brutes simply due to the extra XP that comes from being able to punch the diff higher sooner. It shouldn't be this way. It's broken and unbalanced. All the melee ATs should level at exactly the same rate. As mitigation goes up, damage output should go down.

Yea, that's the point. Tanks get to push diff higher at lower levels and thus level faster. Why isn't this a problem? (And meleers get to do the same across the board compared to squishies, why isn't THAT a problem?)

I'm asking all these questions because without solid answers I have absolutely no way to provide useful information from testing.

Again, if xp/time while soloing isn't relevant, what exactly is? If I run a tank from 1 to 50 solo faster than the same combo brute and scrapper because I can push the diff higher and sooner, why isn't that a balance issue?

I don't have an answer. I'm trying to find it. If we base balance on a teaming experience, what team do we datamine from? A brute and 7 corruptors or 8 kheldians?

And that's precisely where I think most everyone has gone wrong including the OG devs. How a character solos from 1 to 50, in my mind, should be the ONLY metric BECAUSE: Except when it does. When the SG I ran with did a slew of all AT X ITF runs, corruptors came out on top with the fastest time and least number of faceplants but no one thinks a corruptor soloing from 1 to 50 is going to be faster than any of the melee crowd because they can't so it seems that XP/time leveling speed isn't relevant in balance discussions and I'd like to know why.

It's true. My heresy runs strong. I have two bolters mounted in my ceiling ready to drop down at any moment. The subject of what we're balancing for was brought up in another thread and I know there's still no consensus and probably never will be but it'd be nice. If the game truly was balanced around SOs, then it's a completely unbalanced mess right now with IOs. And, yes, again, I'm in the camp that sees that imbalance, wish I never had, and knows I'd have more fun playing if I didn't. I find claims of brutes dishing out WAY more damage than tanks misleading when I view it as barely more damage. The three Bills have pylon times of 2.75mins vs 4.5 mins vs 5 mins. Granted, part of that is because damage buffs are better for tanks than brutes when solo. Scrapper Bill pulls even farther ahead on AoE because he can cycle followup, spin, shockwave where the brute and tank have to do followup, focus, spin, shockwave but again, thanks to double stacked followup, the larger AoE size and the greater number of targets, the tank is barely behind the brute while maintaining a massive advantage over mitigation with all that extra health AND the MotT proc cranking his mitigation into orbit. Then there's that whole proc business where tank procs aren't being punished for the increased AoE size of the attack. Then there's the whole red herring of, yea, well, "that's ONLY at the very high end of performance cuz the game is balanced around SOs and at lower diff all three ATs survive just fine." In the end, I'm left pondering a quote from @SomeGuy where they stated, "They wanted to make Brutes irrelevant. This isn't going to go back." Now, I won't agree that the devs wanted to do this, but I will agree that the end outcome is the same. Where do brutes really win? On fire farms in the AE and only when you have binds for combining insps to reds and you're built for capped fire resistance and defense. EDIT: Or if you're on a team with mates that buff exactly what your build is missing and a kin for fulcrum shift and heals to make up for the lower HP.

I have one with permadom w/o hasten but the build still has hasten. Dom is on auto and I click hasten when I see that it's ready. You need 123% global recharge [ ((200-90)/90))*100 and rounded up ] for it to work. 5 purples gives 50%, 5 LotGs gives 37.5%, so that's still another 35.5% you have to get from other set bonuses, temp buffs, day job powers, etc. Doable, yes. Nice to set up as soon as you log on and never have to worry about again? Yes, of course. But plenty of powers want even MORE recharge and that's where hasten comes in. I think I have 1 50 without hasten and it's a pure concept build not geared for performance.

As mentioned earlier, I farmed DA repeatables to get my main to 666 vet lvls for the screenshot. Getting +4 rewards while effectively fighting +1s made it worthwhile and the SL farms in AE that would have sped things up some, I found annoying to play. At best (with experienced charges also in play,) I was getting 3 vet lvls/hour. One might be able to convert that to inf/min from other posts in this thread.

No, of course not, and as my edit shows, she can't survive it well at all much less stroll into the room with zero chance of defeat like the tank. Again, though, while Bio is awesome in many ways, the mitigation it provides is absolutely inferior to Shield's. But here's the real problem with these discussions. Teams make everything in this game meaningless in general. Balancing powersets and archetypes, especially the ATs that share powersets, based on how they perform with a team is an absolute non-starter for me. How they team is meaningless because when teamed, one aggro sponge and 7 corruptors will decimate everything, even the new higher diff mode TFs. How is that even remotely relevant to determining whether a tank's mitigation to damage output ratio is out of whack with its brute and scrapper cousins? (If anyone ever wonders why I so often ignore stalkers in these discussions, it's because of Hide. I place stalkers as far away from tank/brute/scrappers as I do sentinels.) That's why my area of focus remains the mitigation/damage output ratio. From everything I've seen from others to everything I've tested myself, one thing remains clear: while the damage output of tanks remains at the bottom, (in most cases,) and their mitigation remains at the top, their damage output is too close considering how far ahead they are on mitigation, especially now on the AoE side. I always viewed tanks exactly as @High_Beammentioned earlier: slow, plodding and immortal. Where scrappers were blenders that often took on more than they should and faceplanted for their trouble. That's just not the case anymore as the Trapdoor thread in the scrapper forum is showing. Tanks were fine as they were. If you soloed one, you could ramp up the difficulty far higher and earlier than brutes/scrappers could and that alone closed the leveling speed gap. Now they get the best of everything. Biggest AoEs, biggest targets caps, best mitigation, and single target damage close enough to brutes (when solo, of course,) just massive wrecking balls of doom with zero downside for their godliness.

True statement. My nrg/bio/soul scrapper sits around 75 to 90 seconds on a pylon but she has zero chance of surviving a no insp max diff ITF unless I spend hours single pulling every spawn. Even then, I rather doubt she'd make it through the 2nd mission. Edit: Make that, she didn't survive the first spawn even through barrier and shadow meld. But yes, I should hop on test and build up both scrap and brute nrg/shielders (as I already have with claws and SR) and run the same tests but based on builds I've looked at, and my history of testing with claws and sr, while pylon/AV times will follow the same order you stated, their inability to ignore incoming damage as tanks can will always slow them down considerably against everything else. I will also admit the silliness of it all considering I have to use max diff no insp TFs for testing...

My shield/nrg tank has a 1hr30min solo no insps max diff ITF time and a 2min48sec average pylon time. That's on par with my claws/sr scrapper for pylons and vastly faster on the ITF because the tank doesn't have to waste any time surviving. "Slow" doesn't seem an appropriate description.

Even NCSoft just wants to ignore us!

I have the exact same philosophy! Which is why I spend my cash on really GOOD beer.

You fail reading comprehension. Got it.

It has nothing to do with challenge. It has everything to do with balance. Thus my post in the other thread that offended you so. And as for the rest of that idiotic post, I just added some "challenge" to my gameplay by experiencing this while soloing a +4 MLTF. Love to know how he manages that through capped Smash resists and 65% Nrg resist. Regardless, the faceplant meant no win for me. @BillyMailmanHelped me figure it out. Aeon's unstoppable came back up, giving him a 160% damage buff, his clone had a 30% resistance debuff on me, and the rest is licking the floor.

I admit my nerfherding ways but I buffherd, too!

So what we're left with is AE is the best source of XP/hr. And to that I'm left asking, "So what?"

Wasn't what was being discussed but I'll certainly agree to that. I don't marketeer only because I find it boring AF and I only farm these days to PL new alts. I know it's heresy in some circles but I only carry around 5 billion total inf and have reached an equilibrium between what I spend on new builds and give away vs what I make by playing what little I play these days.

I'm attempting to get some specifics from a marketeering buddy of mine, but I seem to recall from prior discussions that his inf/hour gain completely trounced fire farming.

I suspect it's a side-effect of real life. Just dinged 50 at the end of June. Creeping up on 15 months off work. Interview for new gig scheduled for the 16th. Bah, I like bein a bum.

Because that was the cap on the old difficulty system. The one that existed when the concept of "the game is balanced on SOs" actually meant something rational unlike now where the game is in no way balanced around SOs. EDIT: Or if it is, then it actually is horrifically unbalanced as IOs exist. I do. Often. It's a mess.

That will never cease to crack me up by the way: "The Game Is Balanced Around SOs" automatically means "Since IOs exist, the game is now ridiculously and stupidly unbalanced."